British Council pitches for better Indian workplace English

Nov 21, 2007, 2:59 GMT

Chennai, Nov 21 (IANS) The British may have quit India 60 years ago, but Indians' love affair with the queen's language continues. And helping in the endeavour is none other than the British Council.

It is trying to reinvent the teaching of English and promote better usage of the language at the workplace in countries like India, Sri Lanka and Britain.

'There is a great difference in knowing English and being able to speak it and listen to English and comprehending it,' Rod Pryde, British minister for cultural affairs, told IANS.

At a convention on 'English for Progress-First Policy Dialogue', which ended Tuesday, British Council officials said the institution would be the platform for English-speaking countries like India to take a re-look at the teaching and learning of English and determine their future policy.

'As India moves up the value chain and moves into the knowledge process domain, English language skill is going to be more necessary,' Pryde said.

Pryde quoted experts to bill India as the largest English-speaking country in the world. He said there were more than two billion English-speaking people in the world and the business of teaching English globally was worth over five million pounds (about $10 million).

The policy dialogue in Chennai, the first of its kind hosted by the British Council in India, 'aims at exploring the role of the language in state and private education' in India, Sri Lanka and Britain.

The British Council will train 100,000 teachers from Tamil Nadu in English communication skills over a period of three years and the programme will be replicated later in other states.

Rod Bolitho, academic director of the Norwich Institute of Language Education, which was instrumental in helping the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) revamp English textbooks across India in the 1990s, demonstrated an English proficiency model for high school students.

The model, designed by the British Council for students in Romania, 'could very well be emulated worldwide to increase workplace English skills,' he said.

Earlier this year the British Council introduced Project English 'to create a critical mass movement of engagement with learners, teachers and the corporate world' and 'facilitate reform in the English language education and teacher training'.

The council plans to bring together industry, schools and universities to promote use of English at the workplace in the coming years.

'India is a major player now in the global economy and this is the right time for such an intervention,' Chris Gibson, British Council director for south India, said.

A 2005 Nasscom-McKinsey study said by 2010 India would face a shortfall of 50,000 workers in the outsourcing sector alone, even when the country's 17,000-odd higher education institutions produce nearly 3.2 million graduates.

Nasscom president Kiran Karnik said: 'Today, only 25 percent of India's technical graduates and about 10 to 15 percent of other graduates are employable at once.' This means 75 percent of all those who graduate even from tech-schools cannot be employed.

Nasscom director Sandhya Chintala attributed this to the 'lack of soft skills, including the lack of ability to communicate in English'.

The British Council offers a Business English Certification (BEC), a three-examination suite, to test English language capability in a typical workplace. As many as 111 companies and 14 state governments use these tests to assess their employees and technology students.

© 2007 Indo-Asian News Service